Category: publishing

A culture war is being fought in America’s schools. “According to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books – that is, have them removed from shelves or reading lists – they are on the rise again: 547 books were challenged last year, up from 458 in 2003. These aren’t record numbers. In the 1990’s the appearance of the Harry Potter books, with their themes of witchcraft and wizardry, caused a raft of objections from evangelical Christians.”

“Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.”

Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty has vetoed a bill that would have created the post of state poet laureate. “While respectful and appreciative of the arts, I do not believe Minnesota needs an official state poet. We can benefit from the richness and the diversity of all the poets in Minnesota and recognize and embrace their work as merit and circumstances warrant.”

A study of what people read reveals that men are more likely to read male authors. “Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: ‘Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men.”

Little literary magazines have small readerships – sometimes just a few thousand. But there’s freedom as a writer working for a small publication that cares only for an aesthetic…

Why is so little literature translated into English these days? “Readers looking for books in translation are now likely to find, at best, a few really big names (Eco, Allende, etc.) and then a lot of obscure stuff, which reinforces the idea of translated-works-as-exotic: sort of like subtitled art-house films, a boutique industry attracting a small, steady audience, but one that finds it hard to attract the average consumer.”

Alan Birkelbach has been appointed Texas’ new poet laureate. He’s “a Plano computer analyst whose co-workers didn’t even know he wrote poetry.”

It’s all about niche publishing these days. “Even the niches have niches. Chick lit breaks down into Latina chick lit, African-American chick lit, older woman chick lit, dick lit—which may be written by men, but is still geared towards women—and now fat-girl chick lit. If you have weight issues, get ready for books to regurgitate your dieting struggles, because the weight loss memoir, all of them written by young women, is very hot right now. It’s also a good time to be a knitter, with books on how to knit, how to form knitting groups, chick lit about friends who knit, even a spiritual guide with knitting metaphors. Any day now, the book about knitting for women who are overweight will hit the market. I’m sure of it.”

Publishers are uneasy over Google’s plan to digitize books. In a May 20 letter, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) blasts Google’s so-called Print for Libraries program for posing a risk of “systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale.”

“Cheap books are apparently the spiritual equivalent of universal suffrage, and by offering works by Dan Brown, Patricia Cornwell and Tony Parsons for a pound or two below the prices levied by traditional outlets, Tesco and its friends are “democratising” the book trade. Moving on to the wider implications of our supposedly democratised culture, as a general rule whenever a participant is offered more “choices”, whether in the number of book outlets, TV channels or radio stations, the end result will be to depress the overall quality of the available material.”